As May 14 creeps closer, my time at CSU is quickly coming to an end. What better way to celebrate graduation than to reminisce about all the good times I had? I’ll start at the beginning with my freshman year - I am also using this as an opportunity to test how good my memory is!

The dorms

I moved into room G211 in Corbett Hall on one of the hottest days of the summer. There is nothing better than moving furniture up stairs into a building without air conditioning, but luckily the dorm experience only got better from that point.

I got sick of the dorm food by the end of the year, and there were times where I thought my roommate was going to drive me clinically insane, but I think everyone experiences those dorm moments. Overall, it was an experience that I’ll never forget, and I now find myself missing dorm food four years later.

My friends

I think I had one of the best floors possible. I had relaxed RAs and some made some long-time friends on my floor. Off the top of my head, I can name at least a dozen people from my floor that I still see regularly, and you can rest assured that we still exchange old dorm stories from time to time.

My best memories from that year aren’t from big spectacular events, but rather the small day-to-day interaction with my newfound friends. Walking to Consuelo’s for breakfast burritos, playing volleyball in the courtyard, biking to Old Town and trekking to Durrell Express for a late-night meal were among my favorite things to do.

Other favorite memories include:

Dorm move-in day and playing the “name game” with everyone on my floor (I can still name 38 out of 40-some people!)

My first autumn on campus and staring all the picturesque trees in The Oval

My first time studying all night for a 7 a.m. final. – Then taking a nap and pulling another all-nighter. Don’t worry; I quickly re-evaluated my study habits after that

There are so many options for parking it really just doesn’t seem worth it to pay for a parking permit for four weeks. Four weeks isn’t a long time to move your car every couple days to save the $60-$100 for a parking pass. I mean, that was before I got a parking ticket for parking in Academic Village for an hour and a half on a Friday night. I thought weekends were supposed to be free? ‘Fraid not. Not until “after 8 p.m.” that is. Whatever the case, I have a $30 ticket to pay. Maybe I should have gone with the hassle-free permit… Who knows.

Parking off campus, more commonly known as parking for free

Fortunately for me, a two-minute walk south of campus offers free parking all along Lake Street. It’s so close and convenient that it makes paying for a parking permit sound foolish. There are lots of other streets with free parking all around campus, some farther than others though. For instance, on the north side with the Towers, Parmelee, Allison, and Corbett (I think that’s all of them) there is free parking all along the streets connected to Laurel. There is also free parking on the west side on either side of Elizabeth, but it’s a much farther distance and sometimes hard to find a spot to park. I have yet to check out the east side, just because there are few to no dorms over there, and it’s not close to my dorm, personally. But I imagine there would be lots of free parking along the street on the east side of College Ave. There’s a lot of housing behind the small businesses and it wouldn’t surprise me that there’s free parking, and lots of it.